


blackout

by MathildaHilda



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Non-Linear Narrative, special appearance from a semi-immortal greek misthios
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:47:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21884731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: More than once, everything breaks.
Relationships: Desmond Miles & William Miles, Desmond Miles/Lucy Stillman, Rebecca Crane & Desmond Miles, Shaun Hastings & Desmond Miles
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24





	blackout

More than once, the handholds break apart under his fingers. ( _breaks under Altair’s, Ezio’s, Connor’s)_

More than once, he’s close to desynchronization ( _death by computer games; that’ll be on his gravestone_ )

( _it’s not, but a fool can dream_ )

( _death by virus_

 _he is the virus_ )

More than once, everything breaks.

~

Ezio laughs, deep down in the belly of Monteriggioni.

He flinches at the sound at first, then he hears the joke, and he laughs in synch.

Shaun berates him, calls him delusional, and a mad man in the making.

Rebecca asks about the joke. It’s in Italian, so the punchline doesn’t really work as well in English, but she laughs anyway.

Lucy just smiles and taps her pen against the notepad, a smile filled with mirth playing on her lips.

In a way, it all seemed simpler back then.

~

Templars lash out from the corners of the city, shimmering swords passing through him as if though it was nothing.

It _is_ nothing, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t flinch away and hides his hammering heart and sudden lack of breath from Rebecca, listening ever so intently through the comms.

He catches the ghost sword with his right arm, covering his face as he does, while his left hand reaches out and flicks out the blade.

He almost feels the sting of it, but there’s nothing there but the night air. He almost nicked his finger on the blade, curled as they were.

He needs more sleep, he thinks as he stumbles back to the ruined Villa, leaving any and all Templar ghosts behind.

They never did make it into the Sanctuary. There, the only ghosts that startle him are the ones he’s learned to care about, long after they’ve all gone.

( _he can still smell that damned toilet water every now and again_

_Shaun does too and blames it all on him_

_Ezio almost seems to have had it easy compared to Desmond_ )

~

He knows it’s Minerva.

He knows it’s not writing, or speech, or anything visual.

It’s nothing one can feel.

It’s simply… _there_.

And it’s loud.

_(everything’s broken_

_death was supposed to be peace_ , he retorts, hot anger and hot pain.

_you have to fix this)_

The blade is bloody, the sleeve of his hoodie soaked in it, his hand warm. The dead are dead.

_(everything’s broken)_

The war hammer cracks against a soldier’s jaw, sword spreads entrails across the battlefield. The gun explodes, part of his arm feeling almost lost when the recoil shoots back. The bullet finds its target, blood creates a halo.

Everything is broken, everything is dead.

This war is not his. Not Ezio’s. Not Altair’s. Not Connor’s. Not Haytham’s.

This war does not belong to the dead.

_(oh, if only that were true_ , Minerva breathes.)

The axe flies across the battlefield. The commander has very little left to say.

~

He trips inside the Animus and sends Ezio off the side of the Basilica. The process leading up to the fall is funny enough that even Shaun laughs, but then the landing is so gruesome that it stops soon after Ezio’s hit the ground, and he’s jolted awake from the sudden desynchronization.

( _it hurts to die, even if it’s not entirely real_ )

He hears very little laughter once Juno takes a victory.

He sure doesn’t laugh. And, all he seems to hear is anger.

Anger, and the voice of the man who never seemed to know much else _but_ anger and discipline.

~

It’s another one of those nights when sleep avoids him as if though he had the plague, and he remains awake with the ghosts jumping around and disappearing where walls once were doors when he thinks about how it was before.

Before Abstergo, after the Farm. Before the Animus, and Altair, and Ezio.

Before _everything_.

It’s a vague memory, a snapshot of time just before a Templar bought two shots and offered one to Desmond, and he only remembers it because the woman had been beautiful, and had looked as if though she could snap him in half just by poking him.

She’d asked for a straight whiskey, and then she’d almost spat it out, and asked for something stronger. He doesn’t remember what she’d settled for, but it had been strong enough that she actually started talking.

Who she was talking to, however, he never figured out.

What he does remember about it, though, before the big and burly brute came through the door and almost beat another guy half to death, was the armband that wrapped around her wrist.

Heavy gold, almost mesmerizing when it caught the light.

He forgot to ask about it, though.

The woman was gone once he came back from getting the guys out of the bar.

Twenty bucks in coins littered the counter, and that just about made his night even more perfect.

~

He screams in his sleep; he’s always done that when nightmares came knocking.

He shuts them up with a pillow in his own face.

Most of the time, it’s his death. The sounds are muffled, trapped in deep water.

The rest of the time, it’s someone else who’s already been dead for God knows how many years, because he never was that good at counting in his head.

The memories glitch, jumble words, translates into the wrong language.

He doesn’t know German, but somehow, that seems to be Ezio’s go-to-language whenever the nightmares come around.

( _he doesn’t think Ezio knew German either, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t_

 _but, Desmond would but his money in the things-Ezio-do-not-do-pile_ )

~

Say what you want, but sometimes, heartbreak hurts much more than betrayal.

He _knows_ Juno is right. Somehow, he knows.

He knows Lucy’s been on the wrong end of this crap since the first day he met her, and yet still, he didn’t.

The Apple is lightweight, built to outlast everyone who ever touched it, and Juno is mad with the power she lost millennia ago. The blade is just an extension of his arm, made to execute, where his hands are made to be kind.

( _betrayal is an extension of love, worn down to the core and wrapped up nicely to disguise it for what it really isn’t_ )

( _heartbreak is just another form of betrayal_ )

He doesn’t know if he loved her. He liked her; above all, he did.

Like isn’t a weaker form of love. Like, just makes things more complicated.

~

He hears his father’s voice through the intercoms of the Animus and thinks nothing of it at first.

It’s been years. And, he’s not entirely surprised that William Miles decides to show up when his son has made an irreversible and unchangeable choice made by an old hag in a simulation.

He’s not surprised that this is when his father decides to show up and care just a _little_ _bit_.

He wishes he was surprised. He wishes they had met again under different circumstances.

Computer code makes it pretty hard to communicate sometimes.

( _he’s not completely stupid, despite what Shaun has said in not as many words, because even he remembers enough about the early days of Assassin training to know when someone’s stalking you_

 _Assassins are subtle when they have to be, Templars can be terrible at it, despite their own best efforts_ )

~

the world is a soft gray, shimmering in between with blue and white

take a step, see where you end up

wreak havoc

you’ve always been a little good at that

see where the end of the world lead you

encased in black, trapped in memory

edward is swift with his blade, swifter with his tongue

take another step, the world is gone

deep blue sea, ship of broken wood upon its waves

( _it will sink, before the end of the day_ )

the jackdaw sings with the wind in its sails, breaks the waves, loads the canons with more shot

it all seemed so easy when your only goal was the elimination of the enemy

( _nothing is simple when you are dead_

_it hurts to die; you have done it before_

_he wishes it would stop there_ )

( _it won’t end there_

 _you still have work to do_ )


End file.
